UC should scale back tuition increase plan

San Francisco Chronicle

Published 3:14 pm, Thursday, November 13, 2014

University of California President Janet Napolitano has laid out two solid principles for funding the 10-campus system. First and foremost, the state needs to make a commitment to reinvest in a top-flight university that is an incubator of personal opportunity and economic development. Second, as Napolitano said when she assumed office last year, tuition should be set “as low as we can make it, and fair, and predictable for families.”

Her plan for a 5 percent increase in each of the next five years is certainly predictable.

It’s predictably steep.

It would elevate UC undergrad tuition to $15,564 for the 2019-20 school year. That would impose an unfair burden on the California families who are stretched thin to meet the other rising costs associated with college: room, board and books.

It’s unrealistic to expect California to roll back the clock to a time not t0o long ago when public higher education meant a nominal tuition. UC students paid just $719 a year in 1980.

After a decade of wildly varying increases — a high as 30 percent in one year — UC tuition has been frozen for three years. It’s only fair to ask the students who are receiving a UC education to assume a modest share of the cost of maintaining its world-class standards.

But the state has a significant vested interest in keeping its public research university at a high level.

“When I was the governor of another state, I would have killed to have the University of California in my state ... because I know what it means,” Napolitano, former governor of Arizona, told our editorial board on Wednesday. She noted that communities “up and down the state” with a UC campus tend to be regional economic hubs.

“There is a reason Silicon Valley ended up in Silicon Valley,” she said, noting the proximity of top schools, including UC Berkeley.

She came with one startling statistic that underscored UC’s role as a dispensary of opportunity: Its lowest-income students routinely exceed the combined income of all their other family members within five years of graduation.

The question here is not about UC’s value, or whether it’s important to keep it at the upper echelons of higher education. The issue is how to come up with the funding to achieve it.

Gov. Jerry Brown has insisted that UC regents and CSU trustees maintain a tuition freeze in return for 4 percent increases in each of the next two years.

California can do better.

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Even after the bump from the Prop. 30 tax increases, UC receives $460 million less in state funding than it did in 2007-08. Higher education tends to take a disproportionate hit during economic downturns — and the state’s tax structure leaves it highly vulnerable to peaks and valleys. As we have editorialized, creation of a more stable revenue structure, less dependent on capital gains, should be a priority for the governor.

Napolitano has called the 25-percent increase “a ceiling,” and not her wish, and it could go down with a commensurate rise in state support. We prefer to call it a nonstarter. Brown is right to press UC and CSU officials to find ways to hold down costs. We like the idea of a multiyear schedule of tuition increases that allow families to anticipate college costs — but not at 5 percent annual increases. The long-term solution requires a comprehensive tax reform that leaves the fate of higher education and other state priorities less susceptible to the economic cycle.

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